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Comment: Ferdinand Mount: When you want ignorance, go to an expert

By next weekend we shall be deluged in paper. Nobody is sure quite how many pages Lord Hutton’s report will run to — 400, 700, even 1,000? But before we drown under it all it is worth recalling that at the root of the whole business is ignorance, or rather a dispute between two versions of ignorance.

John Scarlett and his fellow members of the joint intelligence committee (JIC) claimed in the notorious September dossier that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons, which posed an immediate threat and could be deployed within 45 minutes.

David Kelly, like several of his colleagues in the Ministry of Defence, thought this was overegging the truth. But the clips in last week’s Panorama programme (taken from a previously unbroadcast interview) reveal that he, too, believed that Saddam’s weapons were an immediate threat, although he thought they would take days or even weeks to launch.